Recent geographical studies of national boundaries/territories in English-speaking countries ave devoted considerable attention to the instability of nation-states mainly due to an upsurge in ethnic nationalism. While territorial issues have generally been regarded as a conflict between the nation-state and ethnic nationalism, other territorial issues between nation-states have attracted relatively little attention. The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the movement for restoring the Northern Territories, which constitutes a longstanding problem between Japan and Russia, as an example of these issues, and to examine its implications for geography.The issue of the Northern Territories, which are located east of Hokkaido and belong to Japan, emerged in 1945 when troops of the former USSR occupied them. The movement for the restoration of the Territories to Japan started immediately due to extreme pressure from former islanders and local people whose economic base lay mainly in long shore fisheries. A few years later, organizations for the movement were formed. Their main purpose was to popularize the recognition that the restoration problem was a national task for all Japanese and to plan a process of diplomatic negotiations with present-day Russia. This implies that the restoration movement required 'nationalism' from the Japanese side.From interviews with those in charge of this movement, however, the following findings were obtained. Although the purpose of the movement is to realize restoration by popularizing the territorial issue among all Japanese citizens, the people concerned with the movement cannot directly be engaged in diplomatic negotiations. A promising indication of a settlement has not yet been found. In recent years, the perpetuation of the movement itself has become its prime purpose.Noticeable in this context is a recent division among people concerned with the movement. On the one hand, former islanders and their descendants know that the problem of the Northern Territories is a national problem, particularly the former islanders, for whom the Territories are home and who have shown great support for the movement. On the other hand, people who were not born or who had not grown up there and are thus only under an obligation to be involved in the movement, have not supported it so strongly. Nowadays, it is rather unusual for former islanders and their descendants to expect to migrate to the Territories even after possible restoration, but they generally think that the movement as a national task should continue. Partly due to the development of local exchange with Russians in the Territories, descendants of the younger generation are not necessarily aware that their restoration is a national issue.As a result, the movement framework based on such awareness seems to have been in process of becoming a mere shell, and solidarity within the organizations concerned has weakened. In the meantime, the intention of the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs concerning this territorial problem is also related to current international relations, and, as a result, the feelings of former islanders are not fully taken into account. Accordingly, the restoration movement is limited in the sense that the Japanese state does not unit with Japanese citizens.

On 19 October 1965, Japan and the Soviet Union normalized their diplomatic relations after more than ten years of a state of war. Foreign Minister Shigemitsu Mamoru of the Hatoyama administration played a significant role in the process of the Soviet-Japanese normalization talks. This article attempts to discuss the main features of his negotiating policy, relying on the materials which have recently become available in Britain, the United States and Japan.The main negotiating purpose consistently held by Shigemitsu was to conclude a peace treaty with the Soviet Union on the basis of solving the territorial problems. The prime minister insisted on early normalization by shelving such problems. Shigemitsu believed, however, that Hatoyama's formula would fail to solve them and would leave an intractable disturbing factor for future Soviet-Japanese relations. He regarded the restoration of the Habomais and Shikotan as the minimum territorial condition for concluding the peace treaty. In order to obtain Soviet concessions, he started with the hardest demand for the whole of the Kuriles, but he was prepared to retreat gradually from this to the minimum condition.Both domestic and external circumstances were not favourable for Shigemitsu's purpose. The conservative merger between the Liberals and the Democrats did not allow him to make any rapid territorial concessions. The US State Department headed by John Foster Dulles had been implying its displeasure with possible Japanese territorial concessions to Russia. Moreover, the Russians insisted that Japan should recognize their sovereignty over the Kuriles and Sakhalin, though they offered to return the Habomais and Shikotan in August 1955. These circumstances made Shigemitsu adopt cautious and slow negotiations, and, therefore, he decided to demand as a bargaining card the southern Kuriles in response to the Soviet offer.In the summer of 1956 in Moscow, Shigemitsu as the plenipotentiary decided to conclude the peace treaty by accepting the Soviet terms in order to prevent Hatoyama's ‘Adenauer formula’, though he knew his decision would be severely attacked by his colleagues in Tokyo. Consequently, Shigemitsu's effort was blocked and later Hatoyama succeeded in normalization by shelving the territorial questions. As Shigemitsu expected, the unsolved territorial questions became a ‘thorn’ of later relations between the two countries. Considering that, Shigemitsu's negotiating policy could have set an alternative course of postwar Soviet-Japanese relations, though many defects can be pointed out in his diplomacy.

In order to explore differences in news frames regarding controversial historical and territorial issues between Japan and Korea, the contents of four Japanese and Korean newspapers were analyzed by using topic models. Specifically, all the articles on the first page of Yomiuri, Asahi, Donga, and Hankyoreh newspapers during the two years from 2012 to 2013 were analyzed using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). Results indicated that in Japanese newspapers, the territorial issue related to Takeshima (Dokto) was framed as a part of a broader international security topic, whereas in Korean newspapers it was more closely associated with historical issues that are unique to the relationship between Japan and Korea. The issue of comfort women was framed in Japanese newspapers as an aspect of domestic politics surrounding the statements made by Toru Hashimoto, the former mayor of Osaka city, whereas in Korean newspapers, it was more distinctively framed as a historical issue. The potential consequences of different news framing between Japan and Korea, as well as the usefulness of using LDA for content analysis are discussed.

This paper focuses on the Soviet attitude towards border delimitation between the Soviet Union and Japan before/during negotiations on normalizing relations after WWII. The so-called "four island" issue, e.g. Japan's strong territorial claims on Etorofu, Kunashiri, Shikotan and Habomai islets, was then not mentioned. The name of "northern territory" was given to the four islands in the 1960s only after the Soviet Union and Japan failed to sign the peace treaty. The normalization process between the Soviet Union and Japan in the 1950s presents the essential items for academic inquiry: Did the Soviet leadership have an option to return the four islands to Japan? Why did Nikiita Khrushchev suddenly propose to hand back the two islands, Shikotan and Habomai, to Japan during the London negotiations in 1955? Was there really a possibility that Japan would accept the two island proposal and sign the peace treaty? Why did the Soviet Union and Japan finally agree to sign the joint declaration in October of 1956 as proof of normalization and put a clause onto the declaration that stated the two islands would be transferred to Japan after the peace treaty was signed? Russian President Vladimir Putin has renewed Khrushchev's early position. Many hints for breaking the deadlock over the "northern territorial" disputes between the Soviet Union/Russia and Japan are furnished there.

Postwar Japanese diplomatic negotiations with the Soviet Union have involved informal contact-makers in certain significant ways. Their roles and functions, however, have changed over time. Two major diplomatic negotiations involving the restoration of diplomatic relations between the two countries in the mid-1950s and the continuing territorial dispute in the 1960s and the early 1970s are examined to illustrate the case in point.The initial contacts to start negotiations on normalizing bilateral relations were made through informal channels. Fujita Kazuo, a journalist, and Majima Kan, the chief administrator of the National Conference to Restore Diplomatic Relations with China and the Soviet Union, became instrumental in the successful Soviet bid to open a direct communication link with Prime Minister Hatoyama Ichiro (1954-1956) at quite the displeasure of the Japanese Foreign Ministry. Once the formal negotiations set off, informal channels were, nonetheless, still utilized, but this time at the highest negotiating levels and mostly by Japan.Hatoyama's visit to Moscow in October 1956 culminated in the Joint Declaration to establish diplomatic relations but the territorial issue was left unresolved. Subsequently. Japan made repeated efforts in vain to break through the deadlock, including the informal diplomatic maneuvers in the 1960s and Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei's tête-à-tête negotiations with the Soviet leadership in Moscow in 1973. The Soviet Union used non-diplomatic channels to probe Japanese thinking and in turn to convey to Japan some of its own thinking on outstanding issues. The maneuverability of informal contact-makers, however, narrowed in the 1970s as both the Japanese and the Soviet negotiating positions on the territorial dispute hardened.Several other factors restricted the use of informal contact-makers as back channels of negotiations in the 1970s. The Foreign Ministry took the view that the ultimate resolution of the territorial issue squarely rested with the political judgment of the highest Soviet leadership. The hierarchical and closed structure of Soviet foreign policy-making also limited the maneuverability of Japanese informal contact-makers. The Foreign Ministry did not favor using politicians and other prominent individuals with political clout as emissaries, nor did it favor seeing individuals without official credentials approaching Moscow. This stemmed in part from the Ministry's belief in conducting a unified foreign policy, and in part from the Ministry's elitism in handling foreign relations. It was distrustful of Japanese who with unofficial capacity would volunteer to seek contacts with the Communist power.

From 1955 to 1956, Japan conducted a series of negotiations with the Soviet Union to normalize the bilateral relations. During the negotiations, the most difficult obstacle to agreement turned out to be the issue of the Northern Territory, as Japan refers to the four disputed islands in the Kurile island chain. While difficulty on this issue had been expected, it became even more difficult because of U. S. involvement in the process. Based on archival evidence, this article analyzes the role of the United States in the Soviet-Japanese negotiations, and investigates how U. S. and Japan's negotiation strategies interacted.Previous research has contributed to interesting findings about the role of the United States in Soviet-Japanese negotiations. First, it is now known that the United States constrained Japan from making concessions on the territorial issue to the Soviet Union, fearing that the resolution of the issue might encourage Japan to demand the return of Okinawa. Second, until the Soviet Union made a proposal to return two of the islands (Habomai and Shikotan) in August 1955, Japan had not demanded the return of the four islands including Kunashiri and Etorofu. Japan started doing so to prolong the negotiations at least partly because it feared that an easy conclusion of the negotiations might upset the United States.However, there remain some puzzles regarding how Japan and the United States attempted to influence each other to determine how Japan would conduct the negotiations with the Soviet Union. This article aims to answer such puzzles by carefully analyzing the newly found archival documents. For instance, newly discovered archival documents show that Foreign Minister Mamoru Shigemitsu probably recognized from an early stage of the Soviet-Japanese negotiations that the success of the negotiations would ultimately depend on the U. S. position on the territorial issue. Therefore, Shigemitsu devised tactics to obtain U. S. consent to Japan's giving up of Kunashiri and Etorofu in return for obtaining Habomai and Shikotan to conclude the negotiations with the Soviets. (The United States would have regarded such a concession as a violation of the San Francisco Peace Treaty.) In the end, however, by issuing the aide memoire on the issue of the Northern Territory, the United States was able to take advantage of internal divisions among political factions among the ruling Liberal Democratic Party to nullify Shigemitsu's efforts.In the concluding section, the author summarizes the main findings of this research. Then, the author argues that Japanese policy makers may have learned from this experience the difficulty in pursuing Japan's independent foreign policy, making them reluctant to conduct diplomacy in a way that might even marginally damage U. S. interests.

The article attempts to treat both the ‘Okinawa problem’, implying its pending territorial status until the Ryukyus reversion, and the ongoing Russo-Japanese dispute over the ‘Northern territories’ as interdependent political issues. Entertaining no doubts about the term ‘residual’ as it was commonly a pplied to the issue of Okinawa's ‘sovereignty’, this article suggests to interpret the ‘Okinawa problem’ as a ‘residual’ territorial dispute. A ‘territorial dispute’ is seen as occurring, according to Paul Huth's definition, when “both governments seek control of and sovereign rights over the same territory”.Both territorial issues are rooted in the post-World war II rivalry of two superpowers, the Soviet Union and the United States, for the control of geopolitical space. The two issues are unique, however, since they represent territorial disputes, actual and potential, respectively, between both superpowers and a single foreign power, Japan. Moreover, their very existence as the disputes was largely sustained by the continuous rivalry of the superpowers, thus forming a peculiar ‘balance of power’. Hence, in view of a broad range of the research subject and its so far unexplored quality, the primary goal of the article is to pose a scholarly problem rather than draw any immediate conclusions.Emphasizing their differences from the legal standpoint, the two territorial issues were dealt with in separate Articles, namely 2 (c) and 3, of the San Francisco Peace Treaty. However, according to the treaty's principal author, John Foster Dulles, Article 26 provided for the possibility of the United States' gaining “full sovereignty over the Ryukyus”, in case “Japan recognized that the Soviet Union was entitled to full sovereignty over the Kuriles”.It is this particular interpretation, personally given by Dulles to Japan's Foreign Minister Shigemitsu Mamoru in August 1956, which makes it possible to regard the ‘Okinawa issue’ as a residual territorial dispute. Conveyed inn the course of the Soviet-Japanese normalization talks, this statement served to intensify the interdependence of both territorial issues and to confirm the US position of a concerned ‘third power’. The subsequent application of the ‘Okinawa-Kuriles’ linkage by both the Japanese and the Soviet negotiators, namely Mono Ichiro and Nikita Khruschev, in October 1956 testify to the political uses of international law on their part.The article's concluding section draws critical attention to post-Cold war efforts to employ the ‘Okinawa reversion’ model for the purpose of resolving the Russo-Japanese territorial dispute in a way presumably identical to the Cold war approach. The Appendix contains a unique document which was found in the US National Archives. Dated August 8, 1967, it is a ‘secret memorandum’ written by Legal Advisor Mark Feldman to Richard Sneider, the US Department of State country director for Japan. This document, in particular, addressed the issue of possible Ryukyus reversion “by executive agreement without formal congressional action”. As such, it is presumed to be directly applicable in terms of modeling the ‘Kuriles issue’ resolution on the ‘Okinawa reversion’ in the context of foreign policy prerogatives of the President and the Diet in post-Soviet Russia.

The Soviet Union invaded the Kuril Islands after the end of the Pacific War and Russian border guards had often apprehended Japanese fishing boats on the sea around these islands for the invasion of “Soviet territorial waters”. These numerous incidents by Russian authorities in capturing Japanese fishing boats and their crews seriously damaged the livelihood of the Japanese fishermen involved. They continued to demand the Japanese government to secure the safety of fishing on the sea especially around the Habomai and the Shikotan islands. In June 1963, a part of their earnest wish was realized. The Japan Fisheries Association concluded a private agreement with the Soviet government. This agreement allows seaweed harvesting by the Japanese fishermen in a small area within “Soviet territorial waters”. This article will examine the negotiation process of this agreement.
It took a long time since the restoration of diplomatic relations between Japan and the Soviet Union in 1956 to reach the agreement because it involved an intractable territorial dispute over a Russian-held chain of islands. The Soviet Union proposed to Japan to conclude a Peace Treaty in which Japan world accept to have only two of the islands (Habomai and Shikotan) returned as part of the Japan-Soviet Joint Declaration. However, the government of Japan could not accept this condition and asked the Soviet Union to return not just the two islands but also Kunashiri and Etorofu. Therefore, in order to secure the safety of the Japanese fishermen on the sea, either the Soviets would drop the condition, or Japan would accept the proposal and conclude a Peace Treaty with such provisions. However, both countries exhibited an uncompromising attitude to each other. In addition, many Japanese were indifferent to this local problem.
The individual who resolved this difficult problem was the Chairman of Japan Fisheries Association Takasaki Tatsunosuke. He was a famous conservative political leader known for his contribution in signing a private trade agreement with the People’s Republic of China in 1962. When he participated in the Japan-Soviet Negotiations on Fishery, he personally tried to lead both countries to conclude a Japan-Soviet Peace Treaty by making Russia recognize “residual sovereignty” of Kunashiri and Etorofu and return Habomai and Shikotan. However, the Soviets took a stern approach toward the government of Japan because of the revision of the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty. The government of Japan was not sympathetic to his initiative either. Hence, Takasaki decided to adopt a stopgap measure and sought to conclude a private agreement with the Soviet government in order to avoid the territorial issues. His proposal succeeded in gaining concessions from both countries and in securing the safety of the Japanese fishermen in the given small area. But as a result, ironically, the stability of the Japan-Soviet relations reduced the need for a Peace Treaty and Takasaki’s “residual sovereignty” plan.